Paranormal Activity or How Did Regina Mills Wind Up Here?
by KatxValentine
Summary: Meet Ruby, a peppy sensitive with a clairvoyant grandmother, David, the hapless cameraman (Mary-Margaret included), Regina, the rude real-estate broker, her mother, Cora, and Constance Langdon, the miserable wanting ex-starlet. After a paranormal incident Emma Swan chooses to chase her fears and assemble this awful team of investigators. AU, Swan Queen, Snowing, who even knows.


In a world where Emma Swan did not wind up pregnant with Henry, where fairytales did not exist, and the entire psychotic plot of Once Upon a Time did not occur Emma finds herself brushed with a small gift for the paranormal.

So I don't own Once Upon a Time (no matter how much I firmly believe I could do some good with it), and I don't own American Horror Story, once that comes into play. The moral of the story is that I don't own anything and this was based on a wonderful, wonderful gifset made by the extremely talented Tumblr user Bonestrewn depicting the OUaT cast as paranormal investigators. Sometimes you can't derail the inspiration train. Let's have some fun with this.

* * *

Jail was nightmarish.

It was tedium, boredom, exhaustion, annoyance, restless madness. She had remembered wild things and feelings, and a man who she had genuinely loved with a charming shock of dark hair and an arrogant smear of a beard across a chin, a mouth she'd liked to kiss. He'd been handsome, perfect, and they would move so far off and the world would be an open book. She would no longer continue to be the foster kid, the orphan, the little blonde girl who waited with baited breath for her sympathy families to buy her birthday presents and congratulate her on good grades. These things never came and the grades were never good and her birth was some kind of unfortunate occurrence to be disregarded and tossed aside. The man had dropped his blame in her lap and she'd been foolish. Love wasn't worth it. She'd been that blind, and it had earned her consecutive months in jail.

She swore it would not happen again. Emma Swan did not want to say that love would embitter her. She scoffed at the idea of embitterment. As if one guy would break what a hundred synthetic systems had failed to.

She could not admit to herself that he had come dangerously close.

The scratchy, orange jumpsuit that hugged her too tightly when she sat some ways and flopped too loosely when she sat in other ways made her skin crawl. With a permanent frown affixed to her face, Emma remained awake long into the night as her cellmate snored quietly.

The light bulb in the hallway threw shadows across the walls, and from the present guard's office she could see the woman's figure distorted against the bleak color, tilted back on a rolling chair like a tightrope walker on the high wire. The thing had no shade and its radiant warmth was sometimes a searing feeling that crept into her skin. She sometimes wondered if touching the bulb with her bare fingers would melt away the flesh, and here and there she felt, almost, like her mind's eye could see the grotesque terror of that happening. Sometimes her head was a bit of a b-list horror film, and she knew that.

She thought it had started when she'd caught one of her foster mothers watching Hellraiser, and since then the cheesy, dark, disgusting nature of overblown terror had become, sometimes, how she could see her life. She didn't know exactly why or how, but she shook it off until a sound assaulted her ears.

She knew the noise. She'd heard it many times. It was the slow, almost missed whine of a bulb just before it went out. Once she'd spent a record-breaking year in a foster home where her room was in a rather dank basement dressed up to look at least halfway like an actual bedroom. It hadn't been, and the lightbulbs burnt out faster than she could understand. She wasn't keen on the sound, but her ears seemed to be, and like a rat sniffing for cheese the blonde immediately turned her head up and glanced as the fiery bits tossed up, around, and lit away.

"Ugh..." Emma groaned quietly, and sat up on her elbows in the bunk, shifting position like she could draw her feet away from the dark. She never liked it, the complete black, and it felt like it pressed around her ears, her nose, her eyes, her whole body.

A set of footsteps. Pretty quick, and a voice, even quicker, "Lights are all out."

Another voice jumped right in, one of only male ones. Joey and Marina, the guards whose prison romance was kept locked within the dreary grey walls around them. Joey was married. Emma knew because there was a tan line on the ring finger of his left hand, and though it was faint it screamed like the daylight she did not get to see often. Marina was another idiot lost to the current of masculine charm. Not that Joey was particularly charming, but she supposed fucking was just what two people did when they suffered this imprisonment from the outside looking in.

Life and death sometimes hinged on her ability to notice and observe, so it was literally the first thing she did every time she entered a place. She found a new 'home' (what nonsense, what muddle, what bullshit, she always thought, she did not have a 'home') and she looked to the exits, the entrances, where the sharp things were. She took inventory in her head, kept stock. The things that she could steal quietly and would go unnoticed. The places she could hide. She saw foster father's weak knees or foster mother's movements, where they were sluggish, where they were swift. She tried to see everything.

"How the fuck is that possible?" Joey growled out, like somehow it was someone's fault, and it was certainly not his own.

Now it was becoming acutely uncomfortable. Emma felt a small tingle at her back, a series of tiny hairs raising along her neck, her arms. In the dark she groped for her glasses and slid them on, peering about the blotchy handfuls of shadow for yet more dark pools of ink. If she zeroed, listened, she could hear Marina's breath coming in short, nervy bursts.

"This place is full of cheap crap, Jay. You know that." She did not sound convinced in the least.

But there was breathing somewhere around, and footsteps, ones that she had assumed were either of the guards. Her eyebrows furrowed and she leaned in on the top bunk, hands fisted tight into the itchy sheets. The footsteps weren't the sounds of boots, regulation, scuffing on the chilly floor. No, they were- shoes? Women's shoes. It was hard to hear inside their breathy babbling, but the echoes were faint.

_Click clack click clack. _

That was when Emma scampered in reverse, her back bumping the concrete wall hard.

_Because the sound was __**click clack click clack**__ing her way. _

No one was freaking out about this? No one could hear it?!

The sounds had seemed to stop, and it was quiet in the dark, and much colder than she had ever even remembered it being before in this damned jail. The air felt like it froze inside her lungs when she inhaled it, like it swirled into little ice crystals that stabbed her in the fleshy muscle of her own ribcage. Emma Swan did not panic. It was not something that raced within her often. Beyond the fact that she often enjoyed playing the Tomcat she was calm, cool, collected. As remarkably collected as an eighteen year old could be, anyway.

But here that fell away, and there was a high pitched squeal of a sound that sent both the guards into a sudden frenzy that made Emma comically think of a pair of little kids who had- who had-

_Who had seen a ghost. _

A flashlight flickered on in the dark, and with her expression in a taut mask of perplexity Emma Swan stared forward at where the light filtered through the dark of her cell.

And swung mightily from its hinges, yawning, the cell door was open.


End file.
